Yesterday was an interesting day in “Startupland Latin America.” TechCrunch published an article about Groupon’s entry into this market by acquiring Chile’s ClanDescuento and Brazil’s ClubUrbano. According to the article, the blogosphere is abuzz with the fact that ClanDescuento (humorously called SpamDescuento) built up its audience with a ton of spamming, which is a shame since companies such as Compra3 which I wrote about a while back, have been innovating in the space. The article also mentions a blogger called Mariano Amartino who has some interesting posts (note to myself: I need to explore more Latin American blogs).
Also, yesterday, VentureBeat published my article on a really interesting online travel company called Netactica. This is what happens when you get two Argentineans together with an Aussie. You get some innovative and robust end-to-end technology to help Online Travel Agents (OTA) and others (such as the impressive guys at Mantaraya Travel) be successful in Latin America.
Mark my words. Digital Innovation is about to explode in Latin America. There’s still a lot of evangelization to get accomplished in this region, but the list of future success stories will continue to grow from examples such as Buscapé and MercadoLibre to more and more companies getting outside funding.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to give a speech about Digital Innovation in Latin America. It was a great experience and I appreciate Juan Correales’ invitation. I gave the speech within the context of their annual entrepreneurial event. I was able to talk with some impressive students about their projects.
For me, it’s extremely gratifying to see so much interest in hearing about the possibilities today in terms of Digital Innovation. Specifically, I try to evangelize the fact that people need to change their internal “chip” and understand that, in Latin America, they have the same access to gobs of information as well as having low-cost tools for creating new services and marketing these services.
Last Tuesday, we held the first AVC meetup in Bogota. We had a great turn out of successful entrepreneurs with customers in Latin America as well as in the states as well as a local investment fund. We were fortunate in that Javier Montenegro graciously allowed us the use of his company’s amazing offices at Studiocom.
We spoke of the great success stories such as MercadoLibre, Buscape with market valuations greater than $1 Billion and, in the case of Buscape, in the hundreds of millions. Though Brazil, Argentina and Mexico have definitely taken the lead, there was agreement that Colombia has all the pieces to also become a force on the web.
The conversation was great and quite interactive. According to the participants, there seemed to be quite a bit of consensus on two areas where the Colombian environment needs a bit of help in terms of entrepreneurship: 1) training and preparation of talent (e.g., technical and otherwise) and 2) guidance for entrepreneurs wanting to take their companies to the next level. Also, it seems that there is much interest in any initiatives in these areas as more than one participant was asking what was the “next step.” More than a Meetup to discuss these topics, it felt as though the participants wanted to become part of a specific initiative.
This post has a lot of news in a tiny space. The first one, as the title specifies, is that Thomas Floracks, VivReal CTO, and I will be transmitting live from Campus Party Colombia this Saturday at 7:30pm CST (in Spanish). Thomas and I are judges for an initiative that Andres Barreto and Juan David Vargas are running for lean start-ups. Andres actually quickly interviewed us and asked us to give some tips to entrepreneurs in Latin America.
